Finally, Death of the 3.5 inch floppy disk

Spinrite a name not heard in years. My copy with an eye patch dissappeared many moons ago in a land far away.

AFAIK there's also plenty of scopes from Tek and others where that's the only way to get screen shots over to your PC. Unless you bought the now pretty much unobtanium GPIB interface for beaucoup $$$. But mostly I see that with production machines. One floppy slot and absolutely zilch in terms of other interfaces. CNC gear become almost useless without being able to feed data into it.

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Many, maybe most, of them have an old-fashioned serial interface too, for which people have cobbed together interfaces so that they can be controlled from a central point. There are half a dozen, from several different suppliers, in a college machine shop that I'm familiar with- used for teaching CNC machining.

That's not exactly true if you're running the 64-bit version of Win 7. It does allow you to use more memory effectively. The downside is that it does require signed drivers---some of which weren't immediately available. About the only application I use that needs that much memory is Matlab.

I'd like to give the originator of .net a piece of my mind----for about as much time and memory as it has cost me!

Good point. I've installed Ubuntu several times---and it has always been pretty straightforward.

Mark Borgerson

Thats why I keep a USB floppy drive, it gets used once in blue moon when I upgrade hardware, but it pays for itself every time.

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The audio recording guys deal with this on a regular basis. Old tapes come in for remix/remaster and the oxide layer is in danger of shedding. So the tapes are baked at a moderate temperature to allow the binders to hold the oxide on the tape for one last pass through a tape deck.

-a

Occacionally I have been asked to take a look at a machine shop. Mainly because it gets messy in there and they'd rather not carry disks around and worst case get a splotch of gunk or metal chafings into a drive (happened to me once). But usually there was only one or two of the machines that had RS232, sometimes none.

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And that was what exactly??? That vinyl sales have increased from next to nothing to slightly more than nothing. So what? Compared to their sales 30 years ago many would claim they are still effectively dead.

What, that you've never seen one, or they don't exist?

No argument there. However I said music DVD's, not DVDA or SACD.

MrT.

There's a 64-bit version of XP - I'm running it now. But to be fair,

64-bit XP is an oddity that few people have and few developers test for, while the 64-bit support for Win7 is much more mature (it's now almost as well supported as 64-bit in Linux ten years ago).

The application I see that needs lots of memory is for virtual machines

- it's good to have a 64-bit host and lots of GB's if you want to run several VMs at the same time.

Requiring signed drivers, however, makes a system pretty much useless for embedded development work - you don't get signed drivers for the dozens of hardware debuggers, cards, and other bits and pieces that you need. I seem to remember there being ways around the driver signing requirements, however.

Linux distros have worked hard to learn from the best aspects of Windows

- it would be good if MS tried to emulate some of the best /important/ features of Linux (they copied a lot of KDE's appearance when making Aero - but that is only skin-deep and totally irrelevant when you are actually using the machine).

Some machine shops have very old CNC equipment, last year I had an enquiry to find a spare PDP 11/73 card for one, that MIGHT have had a serial but I dread to think what format of media it might have had.

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This doesn't explain why virtually pristine disks (written only once and a visibly impeccable surface) have difficulties reading and are almost impossible to reformat. I go with those saying that the plastic in the surface deteriorates. And it seems to me that double density, and especially single density disk are more reliable. I managed to recover most from Osborne CP/M disks with visibly damaged surfaces, and used very intensively. (Remember those CP/M machines had no hard disk. Floppies were even used for -- small -- databases. )

Groetjes Albert

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I have tried using some old 3.5's and had some pretty bad luck. I still have people that want to read the larger floppies, and try finding adaptors for that. Speaking of machine shops, one CF card got currupt, and to fix that, required replacing everything.

greg

I had to coach someone through repair and calibration of a circuit board test bed from the 80's. All nicely DOS-based so it worked right off the bat :-)

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Problems with new disks are primarily head alignment issues with the drive. Computer manufacturers, after all, try to use the lowest cost components and there are now quite a few low(er) quality component vendors. Although all the drives might be technically within spec, differences in drift can make them incompatible.

Many high quality preformatted diskettes are made with an embedded high(er) coercivity track lead (similar to hard drives). These diskettes *can't* be reformatted (your drive doesn't have enough power) but can only be erased ... and if head drift prevents your drives from accurately following the lead track then you have a problem.

IME, since about 1995 it's become common to have machines which can't recognize factory formatted disks or to write with one machine and not be able to read it elsewhere.

George

Nope, that is in fact a problem with old disks that may well have been written in a different drive.

Yes, but that effect wont be seen with new disks, just with reading old ones.

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The AUTOEXEC.BAT no less? :-)

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Good grief, and here I was thinking Microsoft _finally_ got around to fixing that. (I mean, cripes... at least look at a flaming CD fellas?!)

I think USB could be difficult due to the fact that the initial loader (in the case of Windows XP and earlier) started in DOS, loaded the drivers into RAM then kickstarted the NT kernel from there, but one would have thought that on modern systems, the BIOS should still at least allow some access to USB drives. And clearly CD-ROMs are accessible as it loads the rest of the drivers that way.

Never the less, this is just one of many countless examples where floppies are still needed. I guess the general public never have to face the dilemma of getting drivers into a new computer, and thus the floppy drive is seen as a needless relic of the past.

Yup, pretty much, a batch file :-)

DOS is so remarkably fast. No grding on hard drives, no wait, it's instant.

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That can create problems in the truly general case. Think about it: you are loading drivers for an HBA and want to get them from a CD-ROM, potentially attached to that very same HBA...

That would seem the most natural PC way of doing things. I'm not really familiar with the Windows boot process anymore but there has to be _some_ point early on where the BIOS is still readily accessible and kernel modules can easily be loaded.

Of course the most elegant way would be to place basic get-you-home drivers on the device itself. Sun managed this twenty years ago with their OpenPROM system, and that didn't even depend on the CPU since they were written in architecture-independent Forth. However that probably requires the kind of centralised planning and authoritative "this is the way it is going to be done" assertion that is difficult to enforce for commodity x86 hardware. The only time I can see you doing it is with a new bus standard: if e.g. PCIe had demanded it manufacturers would have little wriggle room.

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